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The Ambassador

Friday, December 09 th, 2016 at 00:12 am

The Ambassador

JOY REVIEW

The Ambassador is called a documentary, but it seems to be something else entirely. It’s done by Danish journalist Mads Brugger and it was actually funded by the Danish Film Council. Mads plays the role of an ambassador, and he and his secretary were in on this ruse, nobody else was, and they did it all with hidden cameras. The deal being that you can buy an ambassadorship apparently for like $100,000 or $200,000 American from a poor African country. And at first glance, you think, wow, that’s a scandal, but if you think about it, that’s probably how ambassadorships are done the world over: you pony up some money for an ambassadorship to a political campaign; but presumably, it’s a little less nefarious than this. The whole reason the poor African nation sells ambassadorships to sleazy white guys is so these sleazy white guys can smuggle things with diplomatic immunity, including diamonds. And blood diamonds are diamonds that do not have real attribution in a country that’s undergoing war. So, the point being that this is certainly a difficult situation. It sounds almost like Keystone Cops, and part of it is kind of funny. Part of it isn’t funny, it’s scary, and there are apparently at least a couple people in the documentary who were assassinated. So it’s an interesting documentary. It’s a little hard to view it in the way that you would a normal kind of movie, or even a normal kind of documentary, but it’s certainly entertaining. I give it three and a half stars.